IDEA: Shortening boot-time

[David Nielsen]

On fre, 2004-07-23 at 21:02 -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-07-23 at 15:16, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> > Matthew Miller (mattdm at mattdm.org) said: 
> > > On Fri, Jul 23, 2004 at 08:21:05AM +0200, Hans de Goede wrote:
> > > [snip snip snip, here and throughout]
> > > > -move starting some of slow things from rc.sysinit to a service, detect 
> > > > if they really needed early in rc.sysinit and then call/source the 
> > > > service script.
> > > 
> > > Having dependency info in the init scripts and running stuff in parallel
> > > when possible might help here.
> > 
> > The last time this was tried, the total speedup was on the order of
> > 10% or so. Perhaps it's changed, but it wasn't a extreme speedup.
> > 
> 
> There is a lot of value to just getting gdm onscreen ASAP, even if the
> disk keeps chugging in the background. Seth and Bryan have been lobbying
> to do this. User-perceived startup time is basically until gdm comes up,
> and then other stuff can finish while the user types their login.
> 
> Havoc

Yeah, what ever happened to Seth's python based init thingy, it sounded
like such a cool idea when it was presented, but then there was no
follow up. Seth seems to have a lot of good ideas concerning usability,
and making UNIX not suck, we should all pay more attention to him.

- David